by Lee Bond
“Why would Mistress Primrose lie about our man being some new Golem?” Dom demanded, voice full of confusion and frustration. “This don’t seem right. There’s more going on, isn’t there?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that, Dom.” Chevy felt his partner’s frustration quite keenly. “Mayhap it has to do with what happened earlier, with that awful noise, or perhaps to do with the Armory and Forge coming back online. Mayhap our Matrons are run a little thin. There’s an awful lot that happens inside Arcade City we know nothing about. I don’t think Primrose lied, not exactly. I think our Matrons want our lad to be a Golem because that is something they can understand. You see?”
Dom clenched his jaw worriedly. “I feel like this all wrong somehow, now. Aye, our man is a right terror and destroys gearheads like they’re nothing at all, and aye, he apparently poses a tremendous threat to Arcade City, but …”
“But nowt.” Chevy interrupted sternly. He hated the idea of following this particular Matronly request now that new and incontrovertible evidence that they knew even less than they’d imagined had come to light, but they had no choice. “Under King’s Law and by Matronly Request, Garth Nickels, nee Specter, has to go the way of all things.”
Dom grunted. His Bookish inclination was overriding King’s Will, and now all he wanted to do was figure out who and what Garth Nickels really and truly was. About the only thing they seemed to know for certain was that he’d come from Outside. Had ‘Outside’ really come so far as to be able to create a man capable of withstanding King’s Will?
Book –who’d always been right to this moment- said it was impossible. King’s Will and Dark Iron were the most powerful forces in Existence, and try as Trinity Itself might, It had –according to Book- never been able to find the lever capable of shifting their King’s Will. Never would, either.
Chevy looked as kindly on Shackled Al –who’d spent the last five minutes of their impenetrable silence looking as though he were going to upchuck before passing out- as he could through the stoic countenance of his helmet. “We thank you for your time, Shackled Al. The Gearmen appreciate your assistance in this matter, and should you find yourself in need of protection from those who should seek to chastise you for your assistance, please, press this button. Gearman Breton or myself shall come running as soon as.”
Dominic watched in absolute astonishment as his partner tossed the shiny button they’d only just done and taken from Dave the Bartender. He was about to argue handing the damn thing out when he considered the implications of the moment; they’d interrogated a witness in front of two of the most vicious, bloodthirsty blacksmiths in all of Arcade City. It wouldn’t be proper if they let a man die on account of that.
“Aye,” Dom said as cheerily as he might, “do press the button. But,” he added warningly, “only if them across the street actually come across and start bangin’ you about, hear? We ain’t your personal bodyguards. You is a sheep amongst grey wolves, Al. Mind that before you do any pressin’.”
Shackled Al nodded like his head was on a spring, tucking the shiny button away into his jacket pocket, mouth unhinged and uttering an endless stream of promises and thanks. He watched the two Gearmen walk away, then promptly closed his tent flaps and went back to bed.
Outside, Chevy and Dom spoke.
“We really going to do for this bloke Nickels?” Dom asked quietly. “’e seems a right proper mystery, more now than ever.”
“No choice, son, no choice. Mayhap if it’d been one of the other Mistresses to come ‘round with the weapons, but Primrose … I have no wish to be part of her garden.” Chevy licked his teeth. Gods, they could use a brush.
“He ain’t a Golem, I know that for true.” Dom thumped Book. “There’s loads of evidence and data on that breed. They don’t ever run out of Iron, they don’t play nice with anyone and well, if they do travel as our lad has, they tend to stick to a place for a time so they can start up with them old games, hey? Whisper in the walls, Where’s the Baby, Floating Statue, all that. None of that with our man here.”
“Agnethea seems to.” Chevy surveyed their surroundings. All the gearheads were absent now, leaving only the normal folk. Where’d they all get off to, Chevy wondered. And more importantly, wherever they were, what were they getting up to? “Play nice, I mean.”
“Well, aye, she’s been around three times as long as the rest.” Dom stomped the ground beneath their booted feet. “But need I remind you what ‘fair’ Ickford is built on?”
Chevy grimaced. “No lad, no you don’t.” The elder Gearman jerked a thumb towards where the scene of Garth’s latest bit of carnage rest. “Come on then, let’s hurry along and take a quick peek at what we can see. All the gearheads are gone from this area. I don’t like the feeling in me bones.”
Dom followed, saying, “Too bloody right, mate. There’s summat queer in the air. We need to be quit of this place, soon as.”
***
Planet Hospitalis. Central world of the entire Latelian Commonwealth, jewel in the –slightly shoddy crown, Herrig would say quickly, with a perverse grin- and major focal point for every single eye in the entire solar system. There was more happening on Hospitalis now than ever before, from the new rage in food that was quite literally sweeping everything else under the rug to God soldiers, long since thought of as gigantic morons, turning up on doorsteps and asking if they might see their many-generations-removed grandchildren.
The Peak, that monstrous and foreboding place barely even whispered about, destroyed in the cataclysmic escape of The Box itself, apparently returned to its rightful owner after five thousand years of safekeeping. That owner –in a twist the equal of any cringe-worthy episode of Latelian daytime drama- had turned out to be none other than Garth Nickels, the man who’d turned the system on its ear in defeating … defeating a Goddie who’d claimed to be a god in truth.
All that, and more. The Ministry of Examination was now using their seamlessly integrated and infinitely more powerful machines to no longer simply spy on people, instead using their data to warn police and God soldiers alike of impending crimes; few were worried about this new turn in crime prevention save those inclined towards the kinds of activities that were detected by it, but there were those in the Commonwealth who chose to keep their eyes on how such newfound powers were being used.
And how they could be misused.
War, in their own system. The damnable Trinity monsters with their strange and powerful AI machines had not made it to Hospitalis yet.
Yet.
They were –if you believed everything you read and saw on the Sheets and through the ‘LINKs- out there in the stars, trying to take over small colonies on moons and raiding larger planets for supplies. The vast shield allegedly sealing everyone in also kept Trinity’s forces from escape, from calling for more help, from even receiving suggestions on what to do. There were daily updates on the Big Five, but they all said the same.
“We are winning. Trinity is losing. They cannot defeat us.”
The enemy was still out there. They were still trying. They still fought. There was no way to know what they were accomplishing. They could be in control of half the system. They could be slaughtering innocents in the thousands.
There was no way to know, not for certain.
It was awful.
Marcus Aurelius Tizhen knew all of that, knew more, even, simply by being the eldest son of Aurick Vasily Tizhen. People told him things, hoping to curry favor with the second most powerful man in the solar system. They continued spilling their secrets even after he told them –sometimes in a fit of rage, sometimes woefully, sometimes with no feeling whatsoever- that Vasily Tizhen was just a man now, not OverCommander. In nearly every single instance, the hopefuls just nodded knowingly, saying ‘whatever he could do, whenever he could do it’.
Marcus stared out the windows of his apartment, stared out them at the nonstop torrential downpour literally flooding the streets with ankle, and sometimes kne
e, deep water, remembering when the first of the cataclysms had shaken the powerful world of Hospitalis. The eruption of the Space Port was the primary cause of the need for all this rain and it seemed to Marcus –who was by virtue of his temperament a night owl- that the world was always … wet.
He grunted and flipped the channel on the Screen irately; Tricia Takanawa was doing another op ed piece on Chairman Herrig, some fluffy bit of drivel on some businessman or other voluntarily selling some business or other to further the Latelian drive to rid their solar system of Trinity’s soldiers. He could do that sort of news. It didn’t take anything special at all. You just had to know how to read the lines, and he’d been reading lines his entire life.
When the Space Port had gone up like something you imagined Hell was like –Marcus knew all about Hell, and Heaven, and quite a few other things because in certain circles, it was considered the height of delicious danger to familiarize yourself with things best left unknown- he’d been listlessly droning through some of the most uninspired drivel he’d ever read in his entire life; during Gametime, the only thing producers and directors were willing to touch with a ten foot shock prod were stories surrounding the Game. Or the Box. Nothing else.
Sadly, no one was trying to do anything new with the material. Even now, years after the fact, years after The Box had torn through the roof of The Peak like a missile, those very same producers, those very same directors … they were still only considering the possibility of covering what’d happened.
The most shocking thing to happen since the last shocking thing, and those fools and buffoons in their puffy shirts and fancy pants were stuck in the past!
Marcus had learned from some of his friends in the Army –support staff only- about some of what’d really happened that day, and the days before, and the days after, and there was more material in that three day stretch of time than in the preceding five thousand years. A rich treasure trove of wildness, love, fights to the death.
Infinitely more inspiring and exciting than yet another dry rehashing of the invention of duronium, the creation of the Game. Those producers and directors and screenwriters, they all had the same contacts, the same friends, the same ins as he did, but they’d do nothing. They would continue doing nothing until the end of the world.
Marcus flipped relentlessly through the channels, looking desperately for something to take his mind off things. He was in a foul mood, knew he should cheer himself up before going to sleep, because on the morrow, he was finally going to get to see his father. But he couldn’t cheer up, and for so many reasons.
When the Space Port had gone up in flames and explosions and so many God soldiers had met their horrific deaths trapped in their metallic OIP coffins, Marcus Aurelius Tizhen had acted. Not on that pitiful stage, prancing around trying to catch the eye of a disinterested producer or to surprise the jaded director having an argument with his eighteen year old girlfriend who wanted to be in the show. No.
He’d fled. He’d fled to the Space Port. He’d been one of the first volunteers on site, and he’d thrown himself into the act of saving lives. The sights and sounds, the smells and the gritty feel of burning ash –which he’d later found out to his soul-numbing horror had been flesh charred beyond recognition- on his skin, the greasy, oily sheen on a face made for Screens, they haunted him. Every time he closed his eyes, even now, years after, it didn’t take much to summon up the feeling, to hear the wailing sirens as emergency vehicles rolled up to assist, the … the smell of cooking meat.
No one had told him when he’d volunteer that the human brain took a lot of training to remember that what you were smelling wasn’t shubin, but people. Marcus hadn’t eaten meat since that day. The smell of it alone made him violently ill.
No one had told him that he’d wind up washing himself five, six, ten times a day for the rest of his life, to rid him of that greasy, flaky feeling on his skin.
But he’d done it, yes he had. He’d gone in, day after day after day, volunteering his services, working himself until he was bone tired, toiling desperately alongside God soldiers and other men and women with similarly stoic, grim expressions on their faces. This was something that had to be done.
By them, and them alone.
They couldn’t explain why they were there, because honestly, there were a million different places on Hospitalis to be. Places where no one was dying. Places where emergency personnel weren’t cracking open OIPs that’d been welded shut, places where cooked God soldiers didn’t stumble out, the last threads of their lives being spent looking up into a tortured sky full of black smoke, metal scoured clean and bright glinting awfully underneath cracked, broken flesh.
Places where those burned God soldiers hadn’t wept for death. Places where he, Marcus Aurelius Tizhen, hadn’t witnessed giant soldiers snap the necks or pierce the hearts of their fallen brothers and sisters, inexplicably powerful, raw emotion naked on their brutish faces. Places where those living, breathing giants amongst men hadn’t hung their heads for a moment, suddenly seeming a thousand times older, a thousand times wiser, a thousand times wearier. Places where they hadn’t blinked, and gone back to the goofy, easily distracted, monumentally stupid children. Until they stumbled on another OIP, another weeping corpse.
Then it was the same all over again. Raw, ragged emotion tearing away some kind of veil to something so different that it’d taken his breath away, each one of them wearing a palette of emotion more intense than anything he’d ever seen before and … it’d afflicted him.
Well, Marcus reflected wryly, resisting the urge to throw the Sheet control at the screen, he –they- all knew the truth of that now, didn’t they? All but the freshest of the Goddies … thousands of years old. Intentionally made stupid, intentionally addicted to the worst cocktail of drugs and mind-numbing chemicals imagined anywhere by anyone.
On-Screen, Gabe Alzador, one of the worst news personalities Marcus had ever personally met –the man was a wretch, and a skirt-chaser, and addicted to wobble, of all things- was hashing his way through a story about some town or other that’d had some kind of problem with people pretending they could hear the so-called Harmony.
Marcus snorted and finally did throw the control at the Screen. It bounced off and disappeared somewhere behind the unit.
He didn’t care. He looked at his prote. Well after midnight. He should get sleep, should find some way to a clear mind before he met with his father.
But he couldn’t. Because after the Space Port, there’d been the Museum Incident. Terrorists, taking control of the Museum of Natural History, intent on somehow destroying … well, no one even now was terribly clear on what the madman Vilmos Gualf had really been after. Some said he’d wanted to go back to work for the Chairwoman. Others claimed he’d wanted to punish her for some crime he felt she’d committed, when in point of fact, the woman had been guilty –in hindsight- of some of the worst crimes known to Mankind. Marcus was of the personal opinion that the wretched bitch had gotten her just comeuppance, and most of his friends were of a similar mind.
When the dust had settle there, Marcus had once again left the stage to volunteer his services. Some of the same men and women from the Space Port disaster had been there as well, nameless, almost faceless, grimly and direly toiling once more to assist the giants as they moved bodies, brick, mortar, stone. Everything. This time, and luckily, there’d be no skies full of snow-of-flesh, no oily sensation on his skin. Only mountains of bodies. Piles and piles of them. Gualf and his terrorists had been madmen, mowing down countless hundreds in the pursuit of a goal that –had he somehow managed to succeed- would’ve been proven ultimately pointless because of The Final Game, with Sa Gurant’s bizarre transformation, with the appearance of legends in the form of the so-called Harmony Soldiers and with the revelations surrounding the Goddies themselves.
Toil Marcus had, and wept into his chin as he’d cradled bodies of children. That, and more.
After the Museum Incident, his friends had st
opped talking to him. They’d all to a one of them admitted they didn’t understand why he kept leaping into madness like this, why he volunteered to work in these places full of despair and death and misery.
Marcus laughed miserably when he thought of the intervention they’d held for him last year. They’d all been so very concerned, his actor friends. They’d all done their peace, all stood around him, wilfully projecting love and concern and hope and strength and all those other things that people holding interventions were supposed to do for the one they were trying to save. They’d all uttered variations on a theme, unwittingly mimicking each other, unknowingly acting the part of concerned friends without truly being concerned. One or two had –intentionally or otherwise- parroted cribbed speeches from Screenshows he’d been on.
What a joke.
And he, Marcus Aurelius Tizhen, son of OverCommander Vasily, had sat there, listening to his friends, listening to the woman he would’ve married, pretending to listen, when in the back of his mind, all he’d been capable of wondering was why his father hadn’t come, why his father hadn’t said anything about his efforts. Obviously it’d been too late in the day for him to join the Army, even in a non-comm fashion, and there was no way he’d volunteer for God soldier status, but sitting there in this very apartment, succumbing to a strange ennui as his friends had droned on and on and on and on, he’d come to a realization.
That was why he’d rushed crazily to the Space Port. That was why he’d done it again for the Museum Incident. And a few other terrible tragedies here and there down the years. Something in him had clicked, too late to be of any value, too little to mean anything, but still, suddenly, it’d become the most important thing in the world.
He’d risked his life –maybe a titch of … hyperbole there, but it still felt true- every time he’d volunteered at this disaster or that tragedy in the hopes that his father, who surely kept tabs on him, would call him up on the proteus and say ‘well done, son, well done’.